Finding Shelter: How People Game Domestic Relationships

• In Event: Games in the City, Games in the Home

Abstract

Online harassment and misogyny impacts how people navigate online and offline spaces, how they play games, what type of games they play, and where they play games. Women often avoid playing online multiplayer games, and avoid using microphones during gaming, as ways to avoid sexism, unwanted attention, and harassment. One of the ways that this study observes women participating in multiplayer gaming is by playing with their partners in their domestic private spaces.

This paper unpacks this occurrence of gaming in the home as part of a larger ongoing ethnographic research project which combines fieldwork of 'offline' gaming spaces, 'online' digital ethnography, and interviews with people who play videogames with their partners. It uses a theoretical framework which observes affective networks (balances, structures and mediations of power), affordances (a delineation of the limitations and abilities of power to impact and be impacted) and gender dynamics (the influences of powers such as toxic masculinity and gender roles imposed by societal norms) within 'public' gaming spaces and within intimate gaming relationship in the 'private' domestic sphere.

In approaching gaming culture in a way which contextualises and entangles the public-private and online-offline spheres of gaming, this paper collates qualitative data from interviews, surveys, and ethnographic fieldwork to argue that the threats of misogyny and harassment attached to gaming online and attending public gaming spaces infiltrates women’s private domestic spheres and their intimate romantic relationships.

Author

• Mahli-Ann Rakkomkaew Butt, University of Sydney